The Lady Elizabeth
by Alison Weir
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List Price: ££12.99
Our Price: ££6.73
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Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours
Manufacturer: Hutchinson
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Average Customer Rating:   
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Binding: Hardcover
EAN: 9780091796723
ISBN: 0091796725
Label: Hutchinson
Number Of Pages: 496
Publication Date: 2008-04-03
Publisher: Hutchinson
Studio: Hutchinson
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Another Layer to the Story
Comment: Alison Weir shows yet again that she is a skilled novelist, this time taking on the complex and hazy story of Elizabeth Tudor's childhood and leading up to her accession.
Elizabeth, as depicted by Weir, is savvy, politically-minded and ambitious. She is also sometimes naive and all-too-human, especially in her dealings with Thomas Seymour. Seymour's behavior would now be properly referred to as molestation, and the sequences where he invades Elizabeth's space, and betrays his wife in the process, were vividly written - so vividly that I was almost uncomfortable. His fate was not an unwelcome one, and he could have taken Elizabeth down with him.
I continue to be fascinated by Tudor historical fiction, and by Elizabeth in particular. Alison Weir is an excellent author, and while I didn't love this novel as much as I did Innocent Traitor, it is firmly in the four-star tier.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Hmmm
Comment: I didn't really enjoy this book to the chagrin of all of my friends who loved it. I didn't particularly enjoy innocent traitor either. Miss Weir write factual history much better... whilst reading her novels I always feel she is still giving me a history lesson explaining silly things which ruins the flow of the story.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Not recommended.
Comment: I have read several of Alison Weir's non-fiction work, and also her first novel, Innocent Traitor. I thought Innocent Traitor was OK, and hoped that her second would be better.
Unfortunately, I feel it was worse. I found it quite difficult to read through to the end. The characters are quite wooden, and I didn't find the dialogue believable, particularly at the beginning. Elizabeth as a toddler certainly doesn't act or sound like a toddler! I know she is supposed to be intelligent, but I just couldn't find it believable. The dialogue could also have been a little bit more historically accurate at times (less modern colloquial terms).
There are also inaccuracies, which I found disappointing for a historian - Anne Boleyn's necklace was a 'B', not an 'A'. She also did not have a sixth finger; if she had, there is no way that she would have been allowed to (let alone popular at!) the French and English courts.
And, sometimes, she is perhaps too accurate - name-dropping titles of books that Elizabeth is reading. Maybe this was to 'set the scene' a litte, but I found it irritating, and felt like the author was showing off her historical knowledge of the period, rather than developing the description or story further. I've not read any other books that do this.
Personally, I feel that the subject, for a second novel, was a poor choice, especially as popular Tudor fiction author Philippa Gregory has had one published recently. (And does it better too, in my opinion!) Overall this is quite a clunky, wooden and slow read, and I certainly wouldn't recommend it. I will be avoiding any of Weir's future fiction works.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Not as good as Innocent Traitor
Comment: Incredibly I picked this book out of my bookcase and couldn't remember whether I'd read it or not!!! I had to check the last few pages! Not good...
This book wasn't a patch on Innocent Traitor by the same author which was incredibly moving. Maybe it's just that there have been too many books written about the young Elizabeth, I don't know...
Customer Rating:
Summary: Wooden
Comment: I was so disappointed by The Lady Elizabeth. Alison Weir is a reputed historian who has written a number of books about the Tudors. However this fictionalized story of the life of Elizabeth 1 before she became Queen is wooden, clunky and tedious. It's so wordy that it gets bogged down, rather than carrying the reader along. Here's an example: "As more worrisome days passed, ominous with a dearth of news, Elizabeth's condition did not improve; however, the malaise in her body was as nothing to the fever of anxiety in her heart". Weir's dialogue is written in what is probably a reasonably historically accurate idiom (unlike other historical novelists such as Philippa Gregory), but as a result it always keeps the reader at a distance.
There's a school of thought that a good writer will show the reader what characters are feeling rather than telling them, but Weir spells out every thought for us throughout.
I was also surprised and disappointed that she included a significant plot twist that she freely admits in the epilogue is something that as a biographer she doesn't believe ever took place. At this point I moved from being bored with the book to actively disliking it. There's non-fiction and there's good fiction. This book is clearly well researched (and some of the details about Elizabeth's life are very interesting), but ultimately it falls somewhere between the two, achieving neither.
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